John Dugdale at Wessel & O'Connor - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Review

John Dugdale is a 38-year-old fresh York-based photographer known primarily for his commercial work. In novel years, however, as his health faltered to be paid to AIDS-related illnesses, Dugdale has concentrated greatest in quantity of his attention on his art photos, the best of which are abrupted in art-historical references and eroticized mythological themes. He uses an 8-by-10 copse camera (made in 1912), and an ancient cyanotype printmaking proces to bring out rich, saturated blue-and-white images that have attracted considerable attention in the U and abroad since he began exhibiting them in 1991

Dugdale's illness has left him blind in individual eye and with only 20 percent peripheral vision in the other organ of vision yet he remains as productive as at any time He sets up the discharges as before, but now he relies upon assistants to focus the camera. Heroically overcoming his dilemma, he not awayed in this exhibition titled "Nature and Spirit" 40 single photos and a large triptych produc above the past two years in of recent origin York and on a visit to England. greatest in quantity of the photos are humorsome images of landscapes, still lifes and interiors, and an especially graceful series is of male exposeds including several self-portraits. Dugdale call forths in these dreamlike images a kind of gay paradise where everything is bounteous and beautiful, and where homophobia is certainly unknown. a certain quantity of pictures are a testament to his religious convictions. A work titled Lent for instance, is an elegant self-portrait in which the artist, seated unclothed wears a distant, forlorn expression of loneliness, as if, in his observance of the ritual fast, he has sworn not on companionship and love.

Dugdale aims for a kind of transcendental idealism, on the other hand he often undermines it with a bittersweet sentimentality. Certain pictures of doe-eyed young men with completed bodies, and others of pristine flower arrangements in glistening, antique vases, combined with the preciousness of the old-fashioned technique, threaten to fall into an abyss of camp affectation. still Dugdale's witty treatment of mythological themes and quotations from the history of photography repeatedly lend the work a abysmal resonance. Among the show's greatest in quantity striking and memorable pieces, for example, are Wells Cathedral, a research of the same staircase in the grand English house of worship that inspired Frederick H. Evan's 1903 masterpiece A Sea of paces and Nocturne, a playful dream image. In the latter, a man quiescences his head on a table while he is visited through a ghostly apparition visible upon the right. The phantom is perhaps meant to exhibit a gay incubus; this individual is handsome, well-endowed and seemingly benign.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group